Lazarus
Programming => Widgetset => GTK => Topic started by: valdir.marcos on January 14, 2018, 12:38:45 am
-
Just curious, how Lazarus community sees GTK+ movement through GTK4, stabilizing GTK3 and the future end of life (EOL) of GTK2, as happened to GTK1?
-----------------------------------
Firefox 59 Is Dropping GTK2 Support
Written by Michael Larabel in Mozilla on 13 January 2018
Now that Firefox's GTK3 support is finally into shape, Firefox 59 will be doing away with GTK2 tool-kit support.
The latest Firefox Nightly code ahead of Firefox 59.0 (not the upcoming Firefox 58) will drop GTK2 support. As of this week the GTK2 tool-kit code was removed from Firefox with the GTK3 support proving to be suitable.
Bug 1278282 that was opened two years ago to remove the GTK2 code once the GTK3 support was mature is now resolved. Dropping the GTK2-specific code while keeping in the code relevant to GTK3 support lightened the Firefox codebase by just over one thousand lines of code.
Firefox 59 has also been working on an improved screenshot tool, better security in the wake of Meltdown and Spectre, and other developer improvements. Firefox 58 is due to be released on 23 January while Firefox 59 should arrive on 13 March.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-59-Does-Away-With-GTK2
Versioning and long term stability promise in GTK+
GTK+ Development Blog
Allan, Posted on September 1, 2016
This month, the GTK+ team will publish the first in a series of long-term stable releases. This will make GTK+ more predictable and reliable, while not inhibiting future GTK+ improvements.
These plans are a result of discussions held with a variety of stakeholders since initial plans were made at the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto last June.
The new versioning scheme
The new GTK+ versioning scheme is a modification of the “semantic versioning” scheme that we have followed until now. Once a new major stable release has been published, the development cycle starts and we will:
- update the pkg-config file to a new major version, to allow GNOME developers to target the new API during development
- keep the existing major version at the same number
- update the minor version to 90 to indicate a development release
https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-promise-in-gtk/
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK%2B/Lifecycle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK%2B
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/GTK2_Interface
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/GTK3_Interface
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Roadmap#Widgetset_dependent_components
-----------------------------------
-
Just curious, how Lazarus community sees GTK+ movement through GTK4, stabilizing GTK3 and the future end of life (EOL) of GTK2, as happened to GTK1?
A strengthening case for QT ? ;)
-
Just curious, how Lazarus community sees GTK+ movement through GTK4, stabilizing GTK3 and the future end of life (EOL) of GTK2, as happened to GTK1?
A strengthening case for QT ? ;)
Which version ????? <confused :o :-\ > That's even worse.
Anyway: there is a point in dropping, adapting and accepting versions O:-) FPC seems to do that :D
-
Anyway: there is a point in dropping, adapting and accepting versions O:-)
You mean other that keeping us busy for nothing while they chase a hopeless dream of becoming relevant on mobile ?
-
Thanks.
GTK+ 4.0 might be ready to ship this year with its many toolkit improvements
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 28 January 2018 at 03:18 PM EST.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK-4.0-Baking-For-2018
"Those wanting to help out with GTK4 development can work on creating custom demos/applications, porting existing GTK2/GTK3 applications to GTK4, converting custom widgets to the new APIs, and testing. If all goes well, GTK+ 4.0 could be released in 2018.
This GTK+ 4.0 update for those not in Brno can be found via this PDF slide deck."
https://mclasen.fedorapeople.org/gtk4-devconf2018.pdf
-
I would really like to see somebody working on the bindings for GTK3 or even GTK4! It is my graphical toolkit of choice and using Lazarus / FPC to create modern desktop applications would be a dream! GTK2 now looks really acient and there are many features in GTK3 that I want to use with FPC!
-
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 3 February 2018 at 07:38 AM EST.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-2018-Fall-Target
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1005341-gtk-4-0-targeted-for-its-initial-release-this-fall-gtk-5-0-development-to-follow
"The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
It sounds yet to be decided whether for their "fall" target if they would try aligning the GTK+ 4.0 release with the GNOME 3.30 milestone this September or come after that point.
Following the GTK+ 4.0 release, it sounds like they will start working on GTK+ 5.0 right away."
-
GTK4 Ejects The Mir Backend & Drops The Big GDK Lock
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 5 February 2018 at 06:46 AM EST.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-Drops-Mir-Backend
GNOME --
"After adding the Mir back-end for the GTK+ 3.16 cycle, GTK+ 4.0 is dropping this back-end for the Canonical-developed display server.
The Mir back-end has been removed from the latest GTK+ code. This clears out about 6,500 lines of code from the tool-kit's codebase. The removal of the Mir back-end is coming since Mir has been focusing on Wayland protocol support to which GTK+ has more mature Wayland support than Mir. Since Mir's change of focus last year and the work the past number of months, the Wayland support on Mir has become more viable."
----------------------------------
GTK+ 4.0 Gets More House Cleaning, Dropping Old Version References Saves ~7k L.O.C
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 6 February 2018 at 08:55 AM EST.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-House-Cleaning-Continues
GNOME --
"Yesterday I wrote about GTK4 dropping the Mir display back-end in favor of the Wayland back-end. Additionally, the "big GDK lock" was also stripped out. The latest is some additional cleaning to lighten the tool-kit code-base by about seven thousand lines of code.
The latest significant cleanup is removing old GTK 2.x/3.x version references in the code and documentation. By dropping these old version annotations, GTK+ 4.0 saw nearly eight thousand lines of code removed but just over one thousand new insertions across more than 400 files.
The cleanup is quite a bit bigger than many would have assumed for simply dropping mentions of old GTK versions.
GNOME developers are hoping to release GTK+ 4.0 this fall. Besides lots of clean-ups, GTK+ 4.0 introduces the Vulkan renderer, the GTK Scene Kit finally materializing, OpenGL improvements, various API improvements, and a ton of other work. Some of the GTK+ 4.0 changes are outlined via the road-map Wiki page."
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK%2B/Roadmap/GTK4
-
It would be better not to see GTK3 and GTK4 as advancements of GTK2 but as completely different toolkits. Because they are. GTK3 is not necessarily better than GTK2. In some situations it's slower, wastes more resources, has many stability and incompatibility problems, especially with composition managers. It contains "tabletized" widgets which is basically a mockery of the corporate-idealist, dumbed down "material" concept carried out by Google. Its UI elements make GTK3 apps harder to use on a classic desktop PC environment. Many projects (e.g. audacious) has already dropped GTK3 in favor of GTK2 because of these issues. GTK2 is mature enough in LCL and its should not be dropped from LCL. It should be kept and maintained, like Windows MFC.
-
GNOME Might Need To Crack Down On Their JavaScript Extensions
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 31 July 2018 at 12:21 PM EDT. 93 Comments
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Shell-JS-Exts-Problems
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/desktop-linux/1038541-gnome-might-need-to-crack-down-on-their-javascript-extensions
GNOME -- Longtime GNOME developer and Red Hat engineering manager Jiri Eischmann has looked at recent Fedora Workstation crashes and other problems happening with the GNOME Shell and the most common denominator is problems caused by the GNOME Shell extensions written in JavaScript.
While being able to write GNOME Shell extensions in JavaScript was fascinating at first and a low barrier to entry, they seem to be responsible for recent problems users are encountering with the GNOME desktop. Making matters worse is that with the current GNOME Shell environment defaulting to Wayland with the Mutter compositor, when it crashes, it crashes hard. That's compared to when the GNOME X.Org session running into problems running into just a screen blank and being able to restore the clients.
----------------------------------
BRNO HAT Blog of Jiri Eischmann
FEDORA, GNOME, LINUX
Story of GNOME Shell Extensions
Posted on July 31, 2018 by eischmann in Fedora, GNOME, Linux
https://eischmann.wordpress.com/2018/07/31/story-of-gnome-shell-extensions/
-
GNOME Might Need To Crack Down On Their JavaScript Extensions
......
Given that one of the more popular extensions is to restore the System Tray Icon, and there seems to have been several attempts to do so, and there seems to be lots of complaints about them, not surprised !
In Gnome 3.28 they have removed the backward comparability support for the GTK2 System Tray. Ubuntu has sneaked in support for its AppIndicator model and I put a patch in for trunk that can use that on non Unity systems. RedHat flavours do not do even that, you have to use the Shell Extensions and good luck with that !
Be interesting to see if Gnome slowly drop out other GTK2 things they don't like .....
Davo
-
I think the Gnome team is a group of geeks of APPLE . They mock the users
They are looking for something different but in a wrong place
Do not ask me why red hat linux enterprise does not contain "GNOME HELL"
-
Considering that GTK3 was first released 7 years ago, and they're now at version 3.94 getting ready to move to 4.0, I'd certainly say it's probably worth taking a look at revamping the LCL GTK3 backend, and even at moving it towards GTK4 (which luckily isn't significantly different from GTK3.)
GTK2 is old and will be increasingly less compatible with hardware and operating systems as time goes on, so something will need to be done eventually regardless... QT is quite good, but rather more heavyweight than GTK, so it doesn't make sense IMO to have it wind up being the only viable LCL backend on non-Windows/Mac systems at some point down the road.
The gir2pascal application from the Lazarus CCR still works fine even on GIR files generated from current trunk builds of GTK, by the way...
-
Would be really nice to see someone work on the GTK3/4 bindings. Many Linux modern desktop environments use GTK3, Lua has good bindings, D has excellent bindings, too. So in contrast to the opinion of some forum members here, the GTK team does not produce unstable crap ;-)
GTK2 will be for sure dropped by the distros over the time - and it would be nice to be able to use Lazarus for desktop development on Linux, too!
-
GTK4 Seeing Text Entry Improvements, Easier To Create Custom Entry Widgets
Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 16 March 2019 at 01:11 AM EDT.
Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit is some refactoring around the entry widgets to improve the text entry experience as well as making it easier to create custom entry widgets outside of GTK.
Landing recently in GTK was a rework of the entry hierarchy and the introduction of a new widget called GtkText. In the process, a GtkPasswordEntry widget was introduced for handling password-entry-related tasks like caps lock warning and being able to optionally view the contents of the entry field. For developers, this refactoring will make it more easy to create custom entry widgets.
Developers using GTK and wanting to look ahead to GTK 4.0 can learn more about this latest change via the GTK blog.
This comes on top of many other GTK4 changes ranging from Wayland improvements to a big GDK rework, a Vulkan renderer, CSS improvements, exclusively relies upon the Meson build system, the introduction of the GTK Scene Kit (GSK), and many other changes building up over the past roughly three years. After failing to materialize in 2018, it's expected GTK 4.0.0 will make it out this year.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK4-Entry-Improvements
31 Comments
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/1086931
-
......
31 Comments
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/node/1086931
First page of comments not exactly positive. Makes sense ....
As a long term strategy, Lazarus may well be better off making out GTK3 did not exist and targeting GTK4 eventually. How knows, maybe the Gnome developers, while developing GTK4 will realise that they need to take users with them rather than decreeing from afar exactly what users want ?
Davo
-
"This week, we released GTK 3.96.0. Again, it has been a while since the last release, so it is worth summarizing whats new in this release. There is really too much here to cover it all, so this post will only highlight the most important changes.
This release is another milestone on our way towards GTK 4. And while there are still some unfinished things, this release is much closer to we hope to achieve with GTK 4."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GTK-3.96-Released
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1097512-gtk-3-96-released-as-another-step-closer-to-gtk-4-0
https://blog.gtk.org/2019/05/08/gtk-3-96-0/
-
Xfce 4.14 Sees Its Long-Awaited Pre-Release
Written by Michael Larabel in Desktop on 19 May 2019 at 08:31 PM EDT. 11 Comments
DESKTOP --
"The GTK3-ported Xfce 4.14 might see its long-awaited official release in the near future. In preparing for a hopeful August debut, the Xfce 4.14 pre-release is now available.
It's been four years since the release of Xfce 4.12 and in addition to the GTK3 tool-kit re-tooling there has been a lot of UI improvements, vblank support added, colord integration, and many other feature additions."
https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/05/19/xfce-4-14pre1-released/
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfce-4.14-Pre-Release
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1100097-xfce-4-14-sees-its-long-awaited-pre-release
Xfdesktop 4.13.4 Released On The Road To Xfce 4.14 Possibly This August
Written by Michael Larabel in Desktop on 18 May 2019 at 07:26 AM EDT. 19 Comments
DESKTOP --
"Xfce's Xfdesktop 4.13.4 was released on Friday as the newest stepping stone on the long and winding journey towards Xfce 4.14."
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfdesktop-4.13.4-Released
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/1099848-xfdesktop-4-13-4-released-on-the-road-to-xfce-4-14-possibly-this-august